In-pursuit-of-knowledge-blog - Everything Is Interesting!

The Fly (1958) is a very good and intelligent movie. Its characters are realistic and it’s an engaging and thought-provoking story (and the practical effects are good). [I’m going to spoil it now, but i really do recommend you watch it yourself.]

I take issue with the doctor’s reaction to his test results- not in how it was written, but with the man himself, fictional as he is. His motivations are not incomprehensible, and he’s not really in his right mind towards the end- I can even comprehend (though I wouldn’t do the same) wanting to destroy oneself rather than lose all agency. Having another conciousness take over your body is frightening (though I do think an imperfect solution could’ve been found with help). But the burned notes are a scarcely-addressed tragedy. The destroyed lab equipment, a nearly perfect teleporter, gone, seems to be the Fly’s doing, assuming the audience can judge this based on which arm acts. That is a great tragedy, but Doctor Delambre seems to be in control again when he burns his notes and his reasoning behind it is chaos! As if destroying his work would prevent the same thing from happening to a future scientist! He didn’t need anyone else’s input to make that mistake, so why should the next person need his? If he had the good sense to leave his research intact, it could be learned from, because that’s how science is supposed to work! You can’t publish results you know are wrong, and you can’t withhold results because they’re not the ones you wanted! What I’m saying is Andre singlehandedly (pun intended) deprived his world of teleportation technology because he had an accident. What a brilliant moron.

The Hunt for New Worlds Continues with TESS

We’re getting ready to start our next mission to find new worlds! The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will find thousands of planets beyond our solar system for us to study in more detail. It’s preparing to launch from our Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Once it launches, TESS will look for new planets that orbit bright stars relatively close to Earth. We’re expecting to find giant planets, like Jupiter, but we’re also predicting we’ll find Earth-sized planets. Most of those planets will be within 300 light-years of Earth, which will make follow-up studies easier for other observatories.

TESS will find these new exoplanets by looking for their transits. A transit is a temporary dip in a star’s brightness that happens with predictable timing when a planet crosses between us and the star. The information we get from transits can tell us about the size of the planet relative to the size of its star. We’ve found nearly 3,000 planets using the transit method, many with our Kepler space telescope. That’s over 75% of all the exoplanets we’ve found so far!

TESS will look at nearly the entire sky (about 85%) over two years. The mission divides the sky into 26 sectors. TESS will look at 13 of them in the southern sky during its first year before scanning the northern sky the year after.

What makes TESS different from the other planet-hunting missions that have come before it? The Kepler mission (yellow) looked continually at one small patch of sky, spotting dim stars and their planets that are between 300 and 3,000 light-years away. TESS (blue) will look at almost the whole sky in sections, finding bright stars and their planets that are between 30 and 300 light-years away.

TESS will also have a brand new kind of orbit (visualized below). Once it reaches its final trajectory, TESS will finish one pass around Earth every 13.7 days (blue), which is half the time it takes for the Moon (gray) to orbit. This position maximizes the amount of time TESS can stare at each sector, and the satellite will transmit its data back to us each time its orbit takes it closest to Earth (orange).

Kepler’s goal was to figure out how common Earth-size planets might be. TESS’s mission is to find exoplanets around bright, nearby stars so future missions, like our James Webb Space Telescope, and ground-based observatories can learn what they’re made of and potentially even study their atmospheres. TESS will provide a catalog of thousands of new subjects for us to learn about and explore.

The TESS mission is led by MIT and came together with the help of many different partners. Learn more about TESS and how it will further our knowledge of exoplanets, or check out some more awesome images and videos of the spacecraft. And stay tuned for more exciting TESS news as the spacecraft launches!

Watch the Launch + More!

Sunday, April 15 11 a.m. EDT - NASA Social Mission Overview

Join mission experts to learn more about TESS, how it will search for worlds beyond our solar system and what scientists hope to find! Have questions? Use #askNASA to have them answered live during the broadcast.

Watch HERE. 

1 p.m. EDT - Prelaunch News Conference

Get an update on the spacecraft, the rocket and the liftoff operations ahead of the April 16 launch! Have questions? Use #askNASA to have them answered live during the broadcast.

Watch HERE.

3 p.m. EDT - Science News Conference

Hear from mission scientists and experts about the science behind the TESS mission. Have questions? Use #askNASA to have them answered live during the broadcast. 

Watch HERE.

4 p.m. EDT - TESS Facebook Live

This live show will dive into the science behind the TESS spacecraft, explain how we search for planets outside our solar system and will allow you to ask your questions to members of the TESS team. 

Watch HERE. 

Monday, April 16 10 a.m. EDT - NASA EDGE: TESS Facebook Live

This half-hour live show will discuss the TESS spacecraft, the science of searching for planets outside our solar system, and the launch from Cape Canaveral.

Watch HERE.

1 p.m. EDT - Reddit AMA

Join us live on Reddit for a Science AMA to discuss the hunt for exoplanets and the upcoming launch of TESS!

Join in HERE.

6 p.m. EDT - Launch Coverage!

TESS is slated to launch at 6:32 p.m. EDT on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from our Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Watch HERE.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Today's Men Carry Traces of Ancient Wars in Their Genes

Modern men’s genes suggest that something peculiar happened 5,000 to 7,000 years ago: Most of the male population across Asia, Europe and Africa seems to have died off, leaving behind just one man for every 17 women.

This so-called population “bottleneck” was first proposed in 2015, and since then, researchers have been trying to figure out what could’ve caused it. One hypothesis held that the drop-off in the male population occurred due to ecological or climatic factors that mainly affected male offspring, while another idea suggested that the die-off happened because some males had more power in society, and thus produced more children.

Now, a new paper, published May 25 in the journal Nature Communications, offers yet another explanation: People living in patrilineal clans (consisting of males from the same descent) might have fought with each other, wiping out entire male lineages at a time. Read more.

It absolutely does!!!!! There is so much we still don’t understand! So much to be discovered! So much unknown! So much unexplored territory!

“The State of  Archaeology”

Such a scary title right? Well, boy oh boy do I have an adventure for you today.

So, I was at a really bougie historic preservation conference because my bosses were presenting. The last panel I went to was supposed to cover the kinds of issues with Cultural Resource Management (CRM) the state was coming across. 

They ended up talking about how all of this would kind of be fixed if we had more funding from the state and more robust laws surrounding archaeological materials.

But this was a room of basically only archaeologists, and mostly professional archaeologists over the age of 35. We were in such an echo chamber. I was the only “young” student there.

SO. I start getting pissed because the same people just kept practically saying “but HOW do we fix our funding problem, we have such AWESOME sites.” “oh, the public is definitely a vital piece to archaeology” but no one was saying the (what I thought was) obvious.

TL;DR If archaeologists want to fix their problems, they need to DO something about it instead of sitting in an echochamber. WE need to make sure the public knows what we do, and more importantly, WHY it matters. We need to make sure the information we disseminate is not just for ourselves in the present, but for the public, for EVERYONE, and for everyone in perpetuity.

When your hair is wavy/curly sometimes there is a fine line between “messy romantic waves” and “evil witch who lives in the woods.”

don’t fight to prove you’re right- fight to become right. Even- perhaps especially- when that means switching sides.

hate doesn’t just happen. war doesn’t just happen. And we are definitely not “right” enough to kill or bring pain to anyone… // Hina Syeda